Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of hobby and gaming progress through 2025. Last time around I talked about my games at Wardome, putting in one last hurrah with my Creations of Bile list. Since then we’ve done our reviews of Codex: Death Guard and Codex: World Eaters, and now I’m on to a new army.
Most of the testing I did over the last few weeks was with World Eaters – that’s because Norman was taking point on Death Guard and we needed someone to cover the World Eaters and usually when people are less excited about a faction, I’ve got to step up to fill in. And the World Eaters are not as good as the Death Guard, but I think the Berzerker Warband has legs.
With the book out and Wardome done, it’s time for me to start getting in good practice with Death Guard, the army I’ll be playing for at least the next month. The Codex looks very strong, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited about trying out some of the new units and combos.
Test 1: Mortarion’s Hammer
For my first test game I went with Mortarion’s Hammer, testing a list against a chill local guy I’ve played before a few times in this column, Greg. Not the Greg who runs the site. No, not Greggles. No, not the other Texas Greg, Greg Narro. This is a different Greg. I know too many Gregs. They’re all cool, at least.
Anyways, Greg was running Hammer of the Emperor with double dorns, giving us a cool hammer-off style game. For Mortarion’s Hammer, my big goal was to build a list using Defilers, because T11 Defilers in the new Death Guard book seem great and I already have three I converted up and painted for the Rise of the Empire event last year. The list I’m testing looks like this:
Mortarion’s Hammer
- Lord of Virulence
- Typhus
- 6x Deathshroud
- 6x Deathshroud
- Defiler
- Defiler
- PBC
- PBC
- PBC
- 5x Plague Marines
- 5x Plague Marines
- 10x Poxwalkers
- Biologus Putrifier
This was a pretty quick but interesting game. I figured out pretty quick that without sticky objectives I need a different, cheaper backfield holder unit and that this army really needed 2 units of Poxwalkers instead of Plague Marines.
This game has some interesting moments – the Defilers can pop smoke, and that’s helpful, but Dorns are more than capable of popping them even at T11. On turn 2 I live the dream and drop a unit of Deathshroud into Greg’s backfield using the Detachment Rule, with the other one dropping in front. They don’t do as much damage as I’d like to the tanks, though. It takes two turns to chew through them.
The big thing here is that while the Lord of Virulence dropping in and directing shots to an indrect target was neat, I really felt like I wanted Bloat-Drones in this game, and just generally with a Lord of Virulence. The guns they have are stupid good.
Game 2: vs. Chaos Knights
I woke up Saturday morning to a Discord message thanking me for hosting teams practice that day and that people would “See me at 10am.” Cool, I said, then I realized that I had agreed to this and completely forgotten about it.
Fortunately, it wasn’t an issue. I’m doing another teams event in a few weeks with the Astros Militarum guys, and we’ve been talking about lists and trying out some different things. Our team comp may call more for an all-rounder list than another vehicle heavy skew list, so I build toward that. Here’s my list for the next two games:
Virulent Vectorium
- Lord of Virulence
- Typhus
- 6x Deathshroud
- 6x Deathshroud
- 10x Poxwalkers
- Biologus Putrifier
- 5x Plague Marines
- 5x Plague Marines
- Tallyman
- PBC
- PBC
- PBC
- Bloat Drone with HBL
- Bloat Drone with HBL
- Bloat Drone with HBL
I couldn’t really make room for the Defilers, and I feel like the bloat-drones are a much better play. This list gives me a lot more movement and the output on the drones is phenomenal for their cost.
I was up against an Iconoclast Fiefdom Chaos Knights list, which makes a better play if you have Daemons getting used elsewhere on your team. It can still sticky objectives with Cultists and the Accursed Cultist unit is a real bruiser – plus it can come back when it’s killed.
I went second in this game, and Chris opened by throwing his AC/DC unit across the table and generally spreading out with everything. That’s the right play, as it makes it very hard for me to teleport in with Deathshroud and also stuffs me in my zone. The bad news for Chris is that -1 damage just destroys the ouptut on the Accursed, so they kill my poxwalkers and get stopped dead by my Plague Marines the following turn. I kill the Accursed, they come back, and I get to work on trying to dig out against the knights. Killing the three closest isn’t too bad, but I have to drop my Deathshroud in my zone early and that’s killer – it means they’ll spend multiple turns trying to reach mid-table, even with 5″ movement, and Chris can kite them pretty easily. Even when they do reach the War dogs, they don’t do as much damage as I’d like and bounce a couple of times without killing anything – you do not want to be wounding on 5s with Deathshroud. We’ll come back to that later.
I’d end up narrowly winning this game but it was close – a 10-10 in teams scoring. Some of that is Chris getting a stellar turn 1 advance and charge to lock me in my DZ, but it’s also that I struggled to kill the War Dogs in melee and dropping in my DZ made it difficult to cross the table – this is a regular issue I can see having with Death Guard.
Game 3: vs. Chaos Daemons
For my fifth game I was playing into Scintillating Legion, the Tzeentch-specific Daemons army. The way this army works is that it generates flux tokens it can spend on re-rolls for hits, wounds, saves, and damage, and when it spends them you get tokens you can spend to re-roll a hit, wound, or save. Spending those hands them back.
What I found is that you don’t want to be shy about spending these, but you don’t want to spend them when they’ll just hand your opponent an immediate save re-roll.
This was an easier game – Pink Horrors are annoying, but a unit of Deathshroud can tear through them in a turn pretty easily. Likewise, Flamers and Screamers aren’t big threats, either. I make good use of Disgustingly Resilient in this matchup for -1 incoming damage to shrug off attacks from the Lord of Change. Late in the game I use this on Poxwalkers to survive a full round of LoC shooting, laughing at David as D3 damage usually turns into “1.”
I’ll end up bouncing off Kairos after he charges Typhus’ unit, and it takes a couple of turns to kill him in melee. At this point it’s becoming clear that I need more melee output for the Deathshroud. The shooting output with the Lord of Virulence is good, but the melee output against big threats isn’t amazing.
Final Thoughts and List Adjustments
I’m at an interesting stage after these three games. I think the Virulent Vectorium is still the strongest Detachment, as stickying objectives is just so incredibly good for an army this slow and elite. It also just has amazing Detachments and Disgustingly Resilient is among the best of those. Here are some other thoughts I have about list building:
- I’ve come to the conclusion that one unit of Deathshroud is the correct amount. Two eats up so many points, especially two units of 6, and one does enough – it kills, it shoots, and it threatens and opponent’s screens and backfields.
- I think the Lord of Contagion is the best pick for that, as Lance + Sustained Hits on the unit gives them the melee output they need to be truly dangerous.
- The three bloat-drones is the right call and I’m going to build every list that way.
- I probably need another unit of Poxwalkers to get one more unit of Infiltrating action goobers.
- The Plague Marines here were… only OK. I need to build more seriously around them as units I think, and figuring out where Plague Marines “fit” into these lists is the biggest issue. I want at least one Rhino for them, and while I don’t love the Tallyman, only costing 40 points is pretty hard to beat.
- I think I still want the Lord of Virulence in there, but I can probably run him solo. Maaaybe with three Deathshroud, but I don’t think that’s necessary.
That’s it for this week. Check back again next Thursday when I’ll have some more test games and additional hobby progress. See you then.
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